In Democratic Individuality, I argued that at a high level of abstraction, modern conservatives, liberals and radicals believe that the best economic, social and political institutions foster each person’s individuality. Their differences are largely empirical or social theoretical. All clash with modern authoritarians. I will take up practical issues such as torture and the lineage of the neocons and link them to larger issues in how we conceive a decent regime, locally and internationally.

About Me

I am John Evans professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and author of Marx's Politics:Communists and Citizens (Rutgers, 1980), Democratic Individuality (Cambridge, 1990), Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy (1999) and Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence (Chicago March, 2012).

Followers

Saturday, November 29, 2014

Ned Blackhawk is a fine historian who teaches at Yale and served on the Committee that created the Northwestern Report on Evans and Sand Creek here. His op-ed piece in the New York Times yesterday eloquently conveys an account of the massacre and John Evans culpability largely now shared by historians who have studied the matter (h/t Paula Bard, Terence Ball, Peter Minowitz). The University of Denver Report here introduces new comparative evidence, for instance about the conduct of Doty, the Utah Governor and superintendent of Indian Affairs and brings out the conclusions from the evidence more sharply but as he suggests, there is no basic disagreement. The op-ed is worth reading carefully, as are the Reports.

***

Blackhawk is right to name the massacres of indigenous people at Bear River in Idaho and among the Navajo central to the Civil War - I have named this a second Civil War in the West, a genocidal one, for the past two years on this blog.

***

In addition, Adolf Hitler learned from the forced march of the Navajo to Bosque Redondo - see here and here - and the camps for Native Americans are part of the inspiration and even the rhetoric of the concentration camps - Hitler named them "reservations" and spoke of the Soviet citizens he ultimately was defeated by as "redskins" - as well as a source, for David Ben Gurion and successors, of the continuing illegal "transfer" of Palestinians, displaced from their own land by conquest as "permanent residents" in (greater) Israel.

***

Blackhawk's brief article also coud not include the genocide which had accompanied Pilgrim settlement and displaced indigenous people from the founding of Harvard in 1636 - for instance, the Pequot Massacre in 1638 slaughtered some 500 men, women and children and enabled Harvard to receive 200 acres of land - on the East Coast and some of what is now the Midwest. But as he emphasizes, the Civil War, pivoting around Sand Creek, provoked a general indigenous war of self-defense and enabled the mobilization/expansion of Blue Coats who, despite losses to Red Cloud and Sitting Bull, conquered and murdered their way across the country, breaking Treaty after Treaty, until they achieved "Manifest Destiny" (a horrific name) in 1876.

***

From then on, the US government, having stolen indian land, killed large numbers of indigenous people, and cordoned the remainder on inarable soil, needed to make no more treaties...

***

Below Blackhawk's article is a brief account supposedly of the schedule of the Spiritual Healing run now occurring from the Denver Post. But the photograph accompanying the schedule is the racist plaque to the "Sand Creek battle," still at the National Sand Creek Massacre Historical Site but precisely what three federal commissions declared in 1865 and every serious historian, given the evidence, now declares to be false. John Chivington and John Evans "stand by Sand Creek," in Chivington's words, but are revealed as genocidal killers or as Blackhawk says, ethnic cleansers.

***

The brief Post article suggests that only indigenous people are to run, but actually the march is supported vitally by Bishop Elaine Stanovsky and the Methodist Church, many of whose members will participate, the Governor's Commission on the Sand Creek Massacre, the State Legislature and by the University of Denver which has issued the Report and from which many students and faculty will run. It is also a healing run, not as the last paragraph suggests, a "health run."

***

The article refers to a Colorado Territory Militia. Actually, it was a Federal Third Regiment, the "hundred dayzers," recruited at the instigation of Governor John Evans, which did the slaughter. Had it been a Colorado militia, the US army would not have apologized for the Massacre immediately afterwards (in the Treaty of Fort Arkansas in 1865, for example) nor would there be a National Monument, created by act of Congress, to the Massacre.

***

The reason for all this participation in the run and for a new sense of many leaders in mainstream America is that a decent society in the 21st century needs to acknowledge this history and do what it can to repair it.

***

The writer of this article is mercifully not listed (he or she would achieve some infamy), but that the editors let it pass is a sign of how strong Founding Amnesia is, how weak the grasp of the difference between "exterminating" American racism toward Cheyennes and Arapahos (the word of choice of Evans, Chivington and other contemporary Denverites was "exterminate them") and a truth-telling and honorable society, one that recognizes each of its citizens and tells the story (does not apologize for mass murder) is.

***

Educationally speaking, we have turned a corner, but have yet a long way to journey...

***

New York Times Op-ed

Remember the Sand Creek Massacre

By NED BLACKHAWKNOV. 27, 2014

Photo

CreditChristine Marie Larsen

NEW HAVEN — MANY people think of
the Civil War and America’s Indian wars as distinct subjects, one following the
other. But those who study the Sand Creek Massacre know different.

On Nov. 29, 1864, as Union armies
fought through Virginia and Georgia, Col. John Chivington led some 700 cavalry
troops in an unprovoked attack on peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho villagers at
Sand Creek in Colorado. They murdered nearly 200 women, children and older men.

Sand Creek was one of many assaults
on American Indians during the war, from Patrick Edward Connor’s massacre of
Shoshone villagers along the Idaho-Utah border at Bear River on Jan. 29, 1863,
to the forced removal and incarceration of thousands of Navajo people in 1864
known as the Long Walk.

In terms of sheer horror, few
events matched Sand Creek. Pregnant women were murdered and scalped, genitalia
were paraded as trophies, and scores of wanton acts of violence characterize
the accounts of the few Army officers who dared to report them. Among them was
Capt. Silas Soule, who had been with Black Kettle
and Cheyenne leaders at the September peace negotiations with Gov. John Evans
of Colorado, the region’s superintendent of Indians affairs (as well as a
founder of both the University of Denver and Northwestern University). Soule
publicly exposed Chivington’s actions and, in retribution, was later murdered
in Denver.

After news of the massacre spread,
Evans and Chivington were forced to resign from their appointments. But neither
faced criminal charges, and the government refused to compensate the victims or
their families in any way. Indeed, Sand Creek was just one part of a campaign
to take the Cheyenne’s once vast land holdings across the region. A territory
that had hardly any white communities in 1850 had, by 1870, lost many Indians,
who were pushed violently off the Great Plains by white settlers and the
federal government.

These and other campaigns amounted
to what is today called ethnic cleansing: an attempted eradication and
dispossession of an entire indigenous population. Many scholars suggest that
such violence conforms to other 20th-century categories of analysis, like
settler colonial genocide and crimes against humanity.

Sand Creek, Bear River and the Long
Walk remain important parts of the Civil War and of American history. But in
our popular narrative, the Civil War obscures such campaigns against American
Indians. In fact, the war made such violence possible: The paltry Union Army of
1858, before its wartime expansion, could not have attacked, let alone removed,
the fortified Navajo communities in the Four Corners, while Southern secession
gave a powerful impetus to expand American territory westward. Territorial
leaders like Evans were given more resources and power to negotiate with, and
fight against, powerful Western tribes like the Shoshone, Cheyenne, Lakota and
Comanche. The violence of this time was fueled partly by the lust for power by
civilian and military leaders desperate to obtain glory and wartime
recognition.

Expansion continued after the war,
powered by a revived American economy but also by a new spirit of national
purpose, a sense that America, having suffered in the war, now had the right to
conquer more peoples and territories.

The United States has yet to fully
recognize the violent destruction wrought against indigenous peoples by the
Civil War and the Union Army. Connor and Evans have cities, monuments and
plaques in their honor, as well as two universities and even Colorado’s Mount
Evans, home to the highest paved road in North America.

Saturday’s 150th anniversary will
be commemorated many ways: The National Park Service’s Sand Creek Massacre
Historic Site, the descendant Cheyenne and Arapaho communities, other Native
American community members and their non-Native supporters will commemorate the
massacre. An annual memorial run will trace the route of Chivington’s troops
from Sand Creek to Denver, where an evening vigil will be held Dec. 2.

The University of Denver and
Northwestern are also reckoning with this legacy, creating committees that have
recognized Evans’s culpability. Like many academic institutions, both are
deliberating how to expand Native American studies and student service programs.
Yet the near-absence of Native American faculty members, administrators and
courses reflects their continued failure to take more than partial steps.

While the government has made
efforts to recognize individual atrocities, it has a long way to go toward
recognizing how deeply the decades-long campaign of eradication ran, let alone
recognizing how, in the face of such violence, Native American nations and
their cultures have survived. Few Americans know of the violence of this time,
let alone the subsequent violation of Indian treaties, of reservation
boundaries and of Indian families by government actions, including the
half-century of forced removal of Indian children to boarding schools.

One symbolic but necessary first
step would be a National Day of Indigenous Remembrance and Survival, perhaps on
Nov. 29, the anniversary of Sand Creek. Another would be commemorative
memorials, not only in Denver and Evanston but in Washington, too. We
commemorate “discovery” and “expansion” with Columbus Day and the Gateway arch,
but nowhere is there national recognition of the people who suffered from those
“achievements” — and have survived amid continuing cycles of colonialism.

Correction: November 27, 2014

An earlier version of this article
incorrectly stated that the American Indian leader Black Kettle was killed in
the Sand Creek Massacre. He died at the Battle of Washita in Oklahoma in 1868.

Ned Blackhawk, a professor of
history and American studies at Yale and the coordinator of the Yale Group for
the Study of Native America, is the author of “Violence Over the Land: Indians
and Empires in the Early American West.”

***

DENVER AND
THE WEST

Sand Creek
Massacre: 150th anniversary events begin Saturday

The Denver Post

POSTED:
11/28/2014 01:53:39 PM MST

A monument marker sits on an overlook that greets visitors of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic site in Kiowa County near Eads, November 28th. 2012. (Andy Cross, Denver Post file photo)

Beginning
early Saturday, a series of events will mark the 150th
anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre.

Nearly 200
Cheyenne and Arapaho — most of them women and children
— were killed in the massacre Nov. 29, 1864, by the
Colorado Territory militia.

Beginning at
dawn Saturday, descendents of the survivors will gather
on Monument Hill at the Sand Creek Massacre National
Historic Site in southeastern Colorado for a private ceremony. The
hill will be closed to the public until 1 p.m., but public
events and lectures will be held at the visitors' contact
station and the lower parking lot.

The national
historic site is 23 miles east of Eads.

At 1 p.m.,
Monument Hill will reopen to the public.

According to
a news release, visitors can explore the park on their own or join speakers in the
picnic area for a brief
discussion on the importance of the day and background
for establishing the park.

Later, at 3
p.m. and 5 p.m, park staffers will be at the Crow Luther
Cultural Events Center in Eads for a preview of
two new film documentaries on the massacre.

The films
will be free to the public.

The 15th
annual Healing Run will begin at 7 a.m. Sunday at the
historic site. The runners are to reach Denver in time for a
candlelight vigil at the Denver Art Museum at 6 p.m.
Tuesday.

The Health
Run will conclude with a ceremony beginning at
11 a.m. Wednesday on the west steps of the
Capitol.

Friday, November 28, 2014

The Cheyenne-Arapaho spiritual healing run starts today and culminates in Denver on the 3rd. For details, see here.

***

For the 150th anniversary of the Sand Creek massacre, the State of Colorado (Governor Hickenlooper and the state legislature), have sought broadly to recognize the injustice and work with the descendants of the Cheyennes and Arapahos (driven from Colorado to Wyoming and Oklahoma). In a Denver Post opinion piece in Perspectives yesterday, Justice Gregory Hobbs explains this manifest injustice:

OPINION

Sand Creek Massacre: Colorado's land grab from Native tribes

On the 150th anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre, Colorado admits the eastern half of the state was built on the coerced cession of the Arapaho and Cheyenne homelands.

A wood engraving published in an 1868 edition of Harper's Weekly shows the Seventh U.S. Cavalry charging into Black Kettle's village during the Sand Creek Massacre. (Library of Congress)

Cheyenne chief War Bonnet, pictured during a visit to President Abraham Lincoln, was slain at Sand Creek in 1864. (Library of Congress)

In this 150th year since the Sand Creekf Massacre, Colorado has made to the Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes and, in particular, to the descendants of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, an incalculably important admission: The non-Native settlement of the eastern half of Colorado became possible through the coerced cession of Arapaho and Cheyenne homelands.

In Worcester vs. Georgia (1832), Chief Justice John Marshall recognized that title to lands in possession of Native people can pass to non-Native people only through the cession of those lands by the Indian tribes to the United States and, thence, under the laws of the United States to those residing in a state or territory. "The treaties and laws of the United States contemplate the Indian territory as completely separated from that of the states, and provide that all intercourse with them shall be carried on exclusively by the government of the union."

Native people were in possession of all lands from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific Coast of what subsequently became the continental United States. The land that now comprises the state of Colorado came into the United States through the 1803 Louisiana Purchase with France and the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo with Mexico. In fact, an 1845 Fremont map plainly shows that the Arapaho and Cheyenne possessed the eastern half of what is now Colorado.

As of 1845, all lands south of the Arkansas River through the San Luis Valley and west of the Continental Divide to California were claimed by Mexico.

Colorado Territory came into being in February 1861 at the outset of the Civil War. The Union Congress carved it out of the territories of Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Utah to take into one territory the whole of the Continental Divide's mineral-bearing area running through the heart of the Rocky Mountains from Wyoming to New Mexico.

The 1864 Sand Creek Massacre was the pivotal event in the ultimate removal of the Arapaho and Cheyenne people from eastern Colorado. The 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty had guaranteed possession of the lands from the North Platte River in the territory of Wyoming to the territory of New Mexico south of the Arkansas River.

Following the 1858 discovery of gold in western Kansas Territory, non-Natives rushed onto the Arapaho and Cheyenne lands comprising the High Plains and the eastern slope of what became Colorado Territory. Just prior to the creation of Colorado Territory, the United States also in February 1861 had negotiated the Treaty of Fort Wise with some of the Arapaho and Cheyenne chiefs.

The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 promised the Cheyennes and Arapahos that the territory between the Arkansas and Platte Rivers would be theirs forever. Forever lasted 10 years ... a new treaty negotiated at Fort Wise restricted tribes to a small, remote reservation in south-central Colorado, far from gold country. (Photos from Denver Public Library, Western History and Genealogy Collection)

This treaty shrunk the Cheyenne and Arapaho lands to a reservation in southeastern Colorado. The 1862 Homestead Act passed by the Union Congress made possible the conveyance of ceded Indian land to non-Native persons.

A peaceful village led by Left Hand of the Arapaho and Black Kettle of the Cheyenne, along with other peace chiefs of both tribes, encamped at the reservation under the direction of Colorado's territorial governor, John Evans, who also served as superintendent of Indian Affairs for the territory.

On Nov. 29, 1864, Colorado Cavalry volunteers serving 100-day enlistments in the U.S. Army under the command of Colonel John Chivington of the Colorado Territory ravaged these people.

This year, Gov. John Hickenlooper's executive order creating the Sand Creek Massacre Commemoration Commission admits the facts of this horrendous wrong.

"On November 29, 1864, approximately 675 United States soldiers killed more than 200 Cheyenne and Arapaho villagers who were living peacefully near Fort Lyon, Colorado, a place where American negotiators had assured they would be safe. Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle's village had raised a U.S. flag as symbols of peace, but Colonel John Chivington ignored the banners and ordered his troops to take no prisoners.

"Ambushed and outnumbered, the Cheyenne and Arapaho villagers fled on foot to the bottom of the dry stream bed. After eight hours, the shooting finally stopped and the village was pillaged and set ablaze. Most of the dead were women, children, and elderly men. The few survivors sought safety in neighboring camps, but the descendants' lives were forever changed. The Sand Creek Massacre deeply impacts the sovereign tribal nations whose ancestors were massacred that tragic day, and preventing atrocities such as this in the future is imperative."

Likewise, the Colorado General Assembly's 2014 resolution unanimously recognized the Sand Creek Massacre as an unjust killing of peacefully assembled Arapaho and Cheyenne which reverberates today upon their descendants:

"Be It Resolved by the Senate of the Sixty-ninth General Assembly of the State of Colorado, the House of Representatives concurring herein: That we, the members of the General Assembly, acknowledge the devastation caused by the Sand Creek Massacre and seek to raise public awareness about the tragic event, the Cheyenne and Arapaho people, and events surrounding it."

The University of Denver's report on the role of its founder, John Evans, assigns culpability for the Sand Creek Massacre to Territorial Gov. Evans, who also held the office of Superintendent of Indian Affairs for Colorado Territory:

"While not of the same character, Evans' culpability is comparable in degree to that of Colonel John Chivington, the military commander who personally planned and carried out the massacre. Evans' actions and influence, more than those of any other political official in Colorado Territory, created the conditions in which the massacre was highly likely."

The Sand Creek Massacre provoked a general uprising by the Plains tribes that resulted in the removal of the Cheyenne and Arapaho from Colorado Territory under the 1865 Little Arkansas Treaty and the 1867 Medicine Lodge Treaty.

The 1865 treaty contains an explicit admission that the Arapaho and Cheyenne massacred at Sand Creek were at peace while under the protection of the U.S. flag:

"The United States being desirous to express its condemnation of, and, as far as may be, repudiate the gross and wanton out-rages perpetrated against certain bands of Cheyenne and Arrapahoe Indians, on the twenty-ninth day of November, A.D. 1864, at Sand Creek, in Colorado Territory, while the said Indians were at peace with the United States, and under its flag, whose protection they had by lawful authority been promised and induced to seek, and the Government being desirous to make some suitable reparation for the injuries then done ... ."

In the scant 14 years from 1851 to 1865, the Arapaho and Cheyenne were deprived of their homelands lying between the North Platte River and the Arkansas River, which were then opened up to homesteading. Eventually, homestead entries in Colorado as a whole totaled 107,618 and covered 22.1 million acres of land.

Only Montana and North Dakota experienced more entries, according to Carl Ubbelohde, et.al., in "A Colorado History" (WestWinds Press, 1972).